Could New Hi-Tech Spectacles Cure Color Blindness?

The high tech glasses help those with "red-green deficiency", an inability to see some red and green colours. The genetic abnormality is estimated to
affect about 10 per cent of all adult men and a small number of women. The invention by 2AI Labs, an American research institute, has been produced
based on years of research into how human sight has evolved, the Times reported.

My husband is color blind. In fact, so are his brothers. I could see the benefit of having these glasses, especially since he wears glasses anyway.
Honestly, I cringe whenever he helps my son pick out his clothing. Luckily, just about everything goes with khakis or jeans.

The one thing that's always bothered me about red/green color blindness....those are the colors of traffic signals.

The one thing that's always bothered me about red/green color blindness....those are the colors of traffic signals.

?

edit on 12-2-2013 by smyleegrl because: (no reason given)

That's funny! Everything DOES go with khakis and jeans.
Being color blind myself, we learn 'nuetral colors'. I don't know if these glasses will go over to well or not. Let me explain-

The #1 question everybody ask when they find out you're CB is " What color is this?" Colors are learned as in an apple is red, banana is yellow, an
orange is orange, etc. We see shades or tones of color, so yes, an apple is red but a dark red apple and a rotting brown apple may not be that
discernable (might be a little extreme..but not much).

What I've told people to try to let them know what I see is, when I'm driving at night, a green light looks exactly like a street light so what I do
is look for a different color in the road then I know if there's a traffic signal or not. The drawback to this is when you're driving in an area
where they put the traffic light on the corner and not in the middle of the roadway, I've missed a couple that way, luckily without incident.
Another example is again at night, driving those rural roads where they have flashing lights. From a distance a red flashing is hard to tell from a
yellow. Once I get, say a 100 yards or so from it, I can tell them apart.

I'm wondering if wearing these glasses would feel artificial. The same way as if any of you 'norms' put on a pair of rose colored glasses. I can
see wearing them to aid in my examples above but for daily wear it would be like learning all your colors again.

As a sidenote- The most frustrating thing for me being CB is that I'm a bit of a tinkerer. My self-professed claim is "I can fix anything except
cash registers and computers and I've torn apart a few cash registers in my time". ELECTRONICS. That's the only thing that I lack any skill at. All
those little tiny colored rings on those circuits mean something and it's pretty important to know what order they're in.

On a positive note for us CBers is- since we see shades of color, we can see things camoflaged whereas you 'norms' can't, the military inteligence
community wants us for this skill. And, we can see better than 'norms' under visible infrared conditions like being in submarines and photograghy
darkrooms.

Familial color blindness often runs in Irish families. The last big influx of Irish immigrants brought a disproportionate number of color blind Irish
to the US, if you look at the distribution of cb it tends to group around the places they went even now, Boston for example.

Damn us Irish! I knew it! I tried to tell them "Turn left, turn left! There's some really nice islands down there and we won't bother anyone" but
nope, they just had to park the boat right next to all them other foriegners' boats.

Joking aside, that's interesting. I knew CB was inherient but I didn't know it was more prevalent(?) amoungst the Irish.

I'll have to research the whereabouts of the Irish back when they were the...Pre-Irish?

One of the more fascinating aspects to this breakthrough is how it came about. Changizi, author of Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature
and Transformed Ape to Man, has a long history of investigating the various ways humans think, feel, and see. He has posited original insights as to
why letters are shaped they way they are, how language emerged, and recently, why humans and other primates have color vision.

The ‘Color Vision Is for Sensing Emotions and States' Theory
"Most mammals — your dog, horse, bunny — have two dimensions of color," he told io9, "a yellow-blue dimension, and a grayscale (or brightness)
dimension. Some of us primates, however, have an extra dimension of color vision: The red-green dimension." How Mark Changizi conquered
colorblindness with glasses.

The going theory, says Changizi, is that color vision evolved to help primates find fruits in the forests. The trouble with this idea, however, is
that primate diets are widely variable among those who have the same kind of three-dimensional color vision that we have — and yet we all have the
same variety of color vision.

"I wondered whether, instead, our color vision was for sensing others of our own primate kind, to sense the blushes and other signals we display on
our faces, rumps and genitalia," he told us. If this is the case, says Changizi, then it should be that the primates with color vision have naked
spots.

This topic and thread has been chosen to be discussed by the ATS LIVE crew this Saturday night between 6-9pm pst (9-12 est), as part of this weeks
exciting "Turbo Topics" segment.

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